Amedeo Modigliani

Italian, 1884–1920

BiographyAmedeo Modigliani was born in Livorno (Leghorn), Italy, in 1884. He began his study of painting in Livorno in 1898; after a hiatus necessitated by illness and a lengthy convalescence, he resumed his study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 1902, followed by three years of study in Venice. Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906 and was deeply influenced by the work of his contemporaries: Picasso's Blue Period paintings, and especially the late portraits of Cézanne. In 1909 Modigliani met the sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), who stimulated his sculptural ambitions. Over the next five years Modigliani produced about twenty-five sculptures, including a series of elongated stone heads showing the influence of African art, as well as Archaic Greek, Egyptian, and Khmer sculpture.

Modigliani's painted oeuvre consists almost exclusively of portraits and female nudes. His distinctive personal style coalesced in a series of honest, penetrating portraits of friends and colleagues executed between 1914 and 1916; sitters include the artists Juan Gris (1887-1927), Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973), Picasso, Diego Rivera, and Chaim Soutine (1893-1943); and the critics and dealers Paul Guillaume and Léopold Zborowski. From about 1916, Modigliani's style became highly mannered, with an increasingly exaggerated elongation of the neck and other bodily proportions. In 1916 Modigliani met Jeanne Hébuterne, with whom he lived until his death. Modigliani's health began to seriously decline in 1918; he died of tuberculosis, aggravated by drugs and alcohol, in January 1920.